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A Guide for the Culinarily Perplexed

Recipes that go way beyond ‘keep adding sugar and salt until it tastes good.’

By

Stephanie Butnick

Updated May 8, 2015 3:15 p.m. ET

The day before Passover a few years ago, my cousins and I crowded around a kitchen table in downtown Manhattan. We had come to learn to make my late grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe, which made its way to America from Poland through the Nazi concentration camps in which most of her family perished. I shepherded cold clumps of carp through a meat grinder under my aunt’s watchful gaze, both of us relishing the meticulous detail of this precious family recipe: “Keep adding sugar and salt until it tastes good.”